Out of step: Trump breaks up with his ballroom architect

President Donald Trump initially picked a rando architecture firm to build his stupid enormous bribe palace—er, ballroom, but that firm is now dunzo.

McCrery Architects, you’re fired. Shalom Baranes, it’s your turn to try to please a toddler madman who has millions worth of other people’s dollars to throw at this thing. How do you feel about gold leaf? 

The official story here is that the project is transitioning to the “next stage of development.”

Huh. So you’re saying that McCrery Architects, which mostly builds churches and university buildings and which seemed to have produced initial ballroom plans generated by ChatGPT, wasn’t going to be up to the task?

Unlike McCrery, Shalom Baranes has worked on a ton of federal buildings and is probably far better suited to take this project on. However, it doesn’t say a lot about the character of a firm that would jump in to build a crappy Mar-a-Lago ballroom and graft it onto the White House.

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A White House spokesman, with the typical hype man style that all communications from this administration now seem to exude, said the ballroom would be “the greatest addition to the White House since the Oval Office.”

Come on. The modern Oval Office was built in 1934. The East Wing was added in 1942, but we’ll never know whether this ballroom was a better addition because it’s gone now. The Truman Balcony was built in 1948, and the Rose Garden came along in 1962, but that’s gone now too, replaced by an ugly concrete  patio.

To be fair, if by “greatest” the spokesperson meant “biggest,” that’s actually correct and likely why McCrery is out.

At some point, principal architect James McCrery II must have grown a small bit of spine—or at least acquired some basic aesthetic taste. He clashed with Trump over the tacky titan’’s desire to attach a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to a 55,000-square-foot mansion, because, generally, in architecture, an addition shouldn’t dwarf the main building.

Buddy. Surely you should have known that Trump’s pet ballroom is the main building in this scenario.

Apparently, McCrery dealt with this by simply stopping work on the project back in October, which, honestly, bravo. 

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Shalom Baranes has its work cut out here. No one knows anything about what this dumb building will look like—no information on the proposed height, no clue where there will be offices, no idea about the emergency bunker that existed below the now-demolished East Wing, and no plans submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission for approval. That approval part is just a foregone conclusion because Trump already stuffed that board with loyalists.

You can expect the projected $300 million cost of this thing to increase yet again, because why not. Trump’s playing with house money here. He’ll just deploy his grifty fundraiser to squeeze more “donations” from big companies seeking to curry favor with his administration. They can even keep it on the down low because that is how government works now: private, secret money solicited by the president’s private fundraiser, routed through a private charity so that it can be a donation that gets written off.

It’s a tacky oligarchy funding a tacky building, signing on to Trump’s gold-plated vision of the White House as his personal palace. Shalom Baranes may do a better job executing that vision than McCrery would have, but in the end, it’s an ugly building that represents an ugly stain on the People’s hHouse, and why on earth would anyone willingly participate in that?

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